Pop Culture Maniacs

Pop Culture Maniacs

100 Nights of Hero

“Nothing much was supposed to happen to me. I was supposed to get married, have children, do needlepoint, I guess, then die.”

Pop Culture Maniacs

Sisu: Road to Revenge

Sisu has had a strange life. Made by the same team that gave us Rare Exports, it landed fairly quietly at TIFF 2022. Its reception was warm enough, however, to be picked up for distribution. And although its US release didn't light the box office on fire, it

Pop Culture Maniacs

Keeper

With Longlegs, director Osgood Perkins burst onto the scene. It may have been his fourth movie, but it represented a stark evolution of his style into something more technically precise, more tonally playful, while still staring into the darkness. That shift, combined with Neon's brilliant marketing and audience

Pop Culture Maniacs

Dream Eater

The first movie from Eli Roth's new production studio, The Horror Section, was Jimmy and Stiggs, a jaw dropping descent into goopy, neon madness. It was a perfect midnight movie that nonetheless played the multiplex. That was all it took to convince me that seeking out the studio&

Pop Culture Maniacs

Anemone

"Romans make Romans."

Pop Culture Maniacs

Rabbit Trap

Judging purely by scale, Rabbit Trap could have been made during the depths of the COVID pandemic. Set on an isolated Welsh hillside that gives way to a dense and disorienting forest pushes thoughts of the wider world out of your mind. The cast consists of just four people, one

Pop Culture Maniacs

Relay

Between the complications inherent in releasing movies during the COVID pandemic, lending his voice to animated features, and the limited theatrical runs enjoyed by most streaming studio fare, Relay marks Riz Ahmed's return to the screen in a starring role. So it's quite bold that for

Pop Culture Maniacs

The Roses

Welcome to the year of the romcom! Much has been made of the genre’s disappearance from the theatrical experience. True, they still flood streaming services, with Netflix distributing the best of recent years in Richard Linklater’s Hit Man. But with the exception of Anyone But You, few have

Pop Culture Maniacs

Jimmy and Stiggs

After a couple of fake trailers for amusingly dumb horror flicks, it was a genuine surprise that the opening of the film was shot from Jimmy's perspective. We're along for the ride in real-time as Jimmy putters and mutters about his apartment, doing coke and smoking

Pop Culture Maniacs

Strange Harvest

True crime has been around for hundreds of years, arising not long after the invention of the printing press. Whether it serves as a warning to the populace that a pleasant neighborhood is no guarantee of safety, or as pure entertainment designed to satiate our innate curiosity about the unfathomable

Pop Culture Maniacs

Oh, Hi!

The very first scene of Oh, Hi! announces the shape the story will take. Iris (Molly Gordon) has beckoned Max (Geraldine Viswanathan) to the vacation home she's sharing with her boyfriend Isaac (Logan Lerman) for the weekend. Both women are in disbelief about an unnamed "bad thing&

Pop Culture Maniacs

40 Acres

"To have given each one of the million Negro free families a forty-acre freehold would have made a basis of real democracy in the United States that might easily have transformed the modern world." - W. E. B. Du Bois